Thursday, May 24, 2012

In Faith, Lies a Prison

I told myself I wasn't going to get into how monumentally stupid Pastor Charles Worley's May 13th sermon was, especially the whole idea of using genocide to get rid of everyone he doesn't like. (Think about it, Chuck. Heteros are the ones having all the gay babies.) But then Anderson Cooper had to interview Stacey Pritchard, one of the alleged 1200 church members from the Providence Road Baptist Church:

I'm always amazed at the mental gymnastics that religious people are willing to perform when they know they've been cornered with a contradiction. But what this woman does borders on a comic book style superpower. When Cooper politely tried over and over again to point out that her answers were woefully inconsistent and downright crazy, her position became even more steadfast. It didn't matter to her in the least that she recognized that Cooper's questions sounded reasonable.

You can actually see her give up about a minute and a half into the video, as she rolled her eyes in defiance of his point. The religious brainwashing will simply not allow her to concede that her pastor is perverse, he is barbaric, he is bloodthirsty, and he is psychotic. Just watching her body language, you can see that she knows it. Does that matter to her? Not in the slightest.

Look, I appreciate that this puffed up, narrow-minded, bitter example of a woman had the courage to step onto a national stage to defend Mr. Worley. And judging by all that pretentious eye-rolling and bizarre overuse of punctuated syllables, I'm sure she walked away from the interview with the impression that she eloquently defended that pathetic excuse of a human being. But when a person refuses to stand up against the idea of genocide, no matter how close they may be to the psychopath that suggested it, then that person's mind should be considered to be broken.

The irony here is that fundamentalist Christians like her often quote John 8:32, where Jesus asserts that the truth of his teachings will set them free. But ask yourself, does this video look like a woman who's mind is set free? Or does this sound more like a woman who is so close-minded, so locked in her belief, that she won't even consider acknowledging that she couldn't answer Anderson Cooper's questions, much less admit that she knew he was right?

What these victims of modern religion will never see is that, while they seek to push the people they don't like into a prison of electrified fences, they proudly and habitually march into their own psychological prisons. The walls of their prisons aren't electrified or topped with razor wire; theirs are topped with a cross.